Friday, September 18, 2015

Presenting to you the effervescent festival of noise, the celebration of goondaism and antisocialism. Before I elaborate, watch the video.

https://youtu.be/fGWwfWwSyA8

Now, I'm not someone who dislikes loud music. I play music at full volume on my headset and stand next to the speakers in clubs and concerts. I'm even grooving while typing this to the tunes. Only trouble, I'm in front of a hospital, that has a maternity ward. Imagine the effect of this in the newborns. Also those events that I talked of earlier only affect those who chose to be there. This is not the case here. There are infants and elders at home who are subject to this noise without having a say in it. Also, if you paid attention to the video, you can see the traffic clog that this has caused. There is a mandap right next to the hospital which is going to blare noise ( loud music) for another 10 days. To some it will be music. After all music is sound that is soothing to ears and noise to nd that is not wanted.

Also did you notice that the noise in the video was produced by two competing groups? These are just two out of the many spread in a 500 meter stretch of road. The density is higher than 5 in that space.

You might be wondering why did I call this a celebration of goondaism. Well, how do you think all the money for these come from. They make people pay up. The shops in the area have to pay all the competing groups or they 'persuade' you to. The amount is not chosen by the shopkeeper either. Of course I own no business. I'm just a witness.

Well, I'll be editing an posting this much later than when I'm typing this. However, the content so far was typed under the influence of loud music.

By now, some people would have decided that I am writing all this because I am from a different religion. That's OK. In the time that I have spent online, I have got allegations of various contrasting affiliations. I've got used to it by now. But, if you could get over such petty allegations and think of the matter that I have written, do give it a deep thought.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

You try to be nice,
Try not to hurt anyone,
Eat up your anger,
Don't show it to anyone.

Can you spare the hurt,
Really save everyone around,
Or are you forgetting,
You are also someone.

When you control yourself,
When you do all to keep others peace,
If you are getting to pieces,
Are you really keeping peace.

Should you be nice to everyone,
Without a care in the world,
How you are treated,
By the people who form your world.

Is time to rethink your life,
Time to take control,
Time to rejuvenate the self,
And live a life that's whole.

It's been a while since I've dabbled in rhyme, and I am sure it shows. Needless to say, things aren't all hunky dory. My attitude of treating everyone well and not hurting anyone's feeling, even if not reciprocated, seems like a very bad idea. Not just that it fails to do what I intend, it also leaves me miserable. All the thoughts that I keep to myself, all the complaints that I do not bring out, they stay in and start eating me up. I guess I really need to start being more blunt and aggressive if we need to maintain my sanity.

Monday, July 6, 2015

I was just going through a travelogue that I had written a few years back and couldn't help but notice the changes in my writing style. Back then it was more fun filled. Time has made me more serious as can be seen from my more recent writings. The travelogue I'm talking about is a three part series on a triptoWayanad. Now compare that to this recent writeup on my trip to Malwan. This has such a serious tone to it that I'm sure not many people would be able to live through it.

Makes me wonder. Does time do that to everyone? Is this what people call maturity, or is this just me getting boring. How much of this has got to do with a person's state of mind? I know that Robin Williams was suffering depression and yet he came out with nice stuff in his stand up act. Looks like funny doesn't necessarily come to happy people. Neither will I describe myself as a morose person. What then could this mean? I am trying to figure out coz I think funny could really help me in my regular interactions and also possibly get me more readers. Besides, who doesn't really like to be funny?

There are lots of stuff I would like to write about, but am stuck because it ends up getting too boring and monotonous. Why would I put such stuff up. People like even tech stuff to be funny. If anyone has any suggestions on improving the humor quotient of a writeup, I'm open to suggestions.

I have recently come across a site called 750words. It lets you write your random first thoughts in the morning. It has a simple sign up form and an easy to use interface. It gives you points for writing regularly and more points if you write 750 or more words. It is not a blog though. So the only person reading it will be you. That makes it an ideal site for rough work and idea tracking. You can then take the ideas and modify or tune it for your blog. I'm quite excited about it. Let's see if I can make use of this. Probably people will be spared boring posts such as this one after I take on to that.

Friday, February 13, 2015

One of the most critical things for maintaining sanity in human beings is that (s)he is entertained. Everyone has their own means of entertainment. Some like bushkashi, some like to read and some are entertained at others hurt. But in today's world the most common sources of entertainment are the television and internet. Some people have gone to the extent of combining the good stuff of both these systems. One of the best features of the TV, especially after the cable TV revolution in india with so many private channels coming up, was that you could be surprised often. You just had to surf through the channels and there was a good chance you stumble upon something you like. There was also the possibility of stumbling on to something astounding without even being aware of that. Then there was YouTube, that awesome site, which allowed users to share and view videos. You got a lot of random videos and then you could click next a countless number of times to view all random videos.

Then came this revolution in business where people could get data from the public about there habits. The content on both TV and YouTube is now sorted based on people's viewing preference. The trouble with the approach is that you cannot tune it for individuals. So they came up with the next best thing. Show people the stuff the majority of the people in his region are watching. So, I get repeat telecast of the same movies in all channels, with the only difference being the time it plays at. You surf channels and you would stop coming across anything new in any of them pretty soon. If a program is hit on one channel, other channels targeting the same demographic of audience creates a similar program with slight differences. Whether it be the soap operas of the Hindi and other regional channels or the travel and food shows from the life style channels. Repetition is everywhere. Tired of this TV, I turned to YouTube for solace, only to realize it was no different. Now unless you search for something, what you get is what google thinks you want to watch. How does google decide what it is you want to watch ? It tracks where you are logging in from and shows what a majority of people in your region are watching and liking. Next, they check for what you have watched or someone using your system has watched before. So, if I log into the system that is otherwise used by my sister and go to youtube, what I get is Bollywood interviews and other romcom stuff she's been watching, comedy nights with kapil and koffee with karan based on what India is watching, stuff in that range. None of this is what I want to watch. Sometimes, I don't want to watch stuff that I usually watch. I want to be able click next a 100 times if needed and find something interesting. Unfortunately, that is not an option. Unless you are searching for something, you do not have the option to go to next page. You can scroll on a list of pre-populated videos and then you go through the related fields to get something you like or maybe never find anything interesting.

What this has done is I have cut down on TV to a large extent. I rarely watch TV and go to YouTube only when I have particular things to watch. That means, the countless times when I am absolutely bored and would have gone to YouTube for a surprise has gone. I end up doing random searches over the internet or reading something. While this might not really affect the channels or YouTube much, I am definitely left with a lot less avenues of entertainment. I wish they at least give an option to select random videos without me having to search for it.

Friday, January 30, 2015

I am a strong believer in the theory that with enough will and perseverance, we can achieve most targets. Unfortunately for me, I have either never willed enough or persevered enough for a lot of quests in my life. While I have tried and failed in changing this status quo, I have decided to at least persevere in changing this habit of mine.

For this, one of the primary things that I have decided to target is my time management skills. I have successfully followed times for short durations of time, after which I usually lose my drive. This time over I intend to take it longer. The primary aim is to not lose the drive to improve. I am trying to use some tools like time trackers and time managers for this. It is not an easy job to get into that. I often forget to start or stop my tracker, so the measurements are not accurate. I have not yet created tasks in the time manager because I am not able to understand how to go about it. However, I am getting closer with the tracker. Hopefully, a better tracking measurement will help me with a better time management plan.

Another target I have set is to improve my handwriting. One of the most common comments I have received throughout school was to improve my handwriting. Never tried hard enough then and was never motivated to do that. After reading about some of the great men that had bad handwriting, any motivation that I had disappeared too. Computers and typing felt like a blessing to me, as I hated writing. However; I have come a long way from those days. It has been such a long time that in have written anything with pen and paper that my handwriting has become pathetic beyond mention. I recently took some notes and I could not bear the ugliness of it. So, to this front, I have decided to write something everyday to a notebook. It is mostly going to be random stuff, but let me see how far it goes. So far, while the writing has become more legible and less painful for the eye, it is has stopped improving beyond that. But then it's only been three days. Maybe I will improve if I do not lose the momentum.

Third thing in my mind is physical exercise. Since my job and my hobbies are all done sitting at one place, the attraction that the earth has to my body has increased quite a bit (I'm talking of gravitational attraction here). I need to do something about this. I found out about an interval training method which requires only seven minutes a day that seems doable, but some people have commented that it is very exhaustive. That was understood from the very fact that it was said to be very effective. What remains to be seen is if I can get to start it.

I follow James Clear who gives excellent advice on habit formation etc. I have found his advice to be very useful in some things I tried. I am hoping that this clubbed with the rest of the tools could help me achieve the results I am aiming for.

Anyone else has any tips and tricks that has worked for them in any of these aspects?

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Well, the eCommerce war in India has really heated up. It is not long back that Snapdeal, Flipkart and Amazon had come with extreme deals to get new customers. The deals at Flipkart brought in so many customers that they could not handle the load on their servers and had to end up releasing an apology. Flipkart took the lead in coming up with exclusive deals with Motorola and Xiaomi, which released some really good mobile phones into the Indian market. Amazon followed up with its deal with OnePlusOne and Yureka, both of which are exclusively available on Amazon. Unfortunately OnePlusOne is invite only and Yureka is a flash sale like Xiaomi. Snapdeal so far has not jumped into this exclusive sale deal, or at least not that I know of.

However, when it comes to having sales, none of them can be left behind. The Republic Day sales is going big on all of them. However, why am I writing this one up? Well, I was looking to buy an external hard drive, and since I own a WD device, I was looking for another one from the same guys. The kind of offers that these guys have on these is amazing. They are offering in the range of 20%, 50% and 40% on these. Flipkart is giving an additional 10% to HDFC Card Holders. Looks like this is going to be another war in which the consumer is going to be the winner.

In the offline world, I hear Big Bazaar and Star Bazaar have really big offerings too. The details are yet to be seen. So, hurry, do your shopping before the 26th of Jan, or before the sale ends as per each of these companies and make the most of these offers.

For now, I am breaking my head over a few WD products. WD MyCloud is something that I am really looking into. The ability to have data at home and access anywhere, and the ability have multiple devices sinc with it is awesome. Also, for the same amount of storage, the amount you will be paying for many of the other public cloud services would add up to much higher in less than a year. This is really tempting, but what I went in looking for is a simple 2 TB External Hard Drive.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

After resisting for a long time, I have finally decided to buy a touch only phone. I waited in vain for MI3 or MI4 to no avail. I even spent some time trying to get either Redmi S1 or Redmi Note 4G and even Yureka, I have now become disillusioned with the Flash sales. I fail to understand how so many people manage to sit for these sales time and time again. I had enough after just one attempt for each.

Makes me wonder, is this a new marketing strategy to create interest? Anything scarce really does create an interest. If it is cheaper and better than other things equivalent, then no need to even discuss the kind of interest that can gather. I did wish that they come out of the flash sale mode and come with regular availability, but for now, I have to let these go. I am now thinking of buying Moto G2. It is available all the time, is reasonably good in the price, and I also know enough people around who use it and are very happy about it. The RAM is slightly lower for the times and makes me wonder if it will be worth considering the fact that I do not change my phone often. The last time I bought a phone was 4 years ago, so that should say something about it. In the last 10 year I have changed only 4 phones, and two of them was due to damage.

Considering these facts, and the fact that handling a phone delicately is not an option for me (and my toddler who loves phones), is this phone a good option. A good old Nokia 1100 would have been good considering the toddler, but he just loves smartphones.

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